Land Nobody Wanted' A Natural For National Preserve

July 6, 1986|By Wesley Loy of The Sentinel Staff

OCALA NATIONAL FOREST — Horribly scarred by loggers and turpentine makers, the Ocala National Forest was classified as ''land nobody wanted'' when President Theodore Roosevelt made it a national preserve in 1908.

The Ocala was the first national forest east of the Mississippi and still is the southernmost in America.

It began with 165,000 acres known as the Big Scrub, a sandy, north-south ridge that is the heart of the forest. The Big Scrub is home to the world's largest stand of sand pine, a scruffy evergreen that thrives in the dry, infertile sands of the ridge.

Thousands of acres have been added since. Now the forest takes in more than 430,000 acres in three counties: Lake, Marion and Putnam.

The forest's history is marked by natural disasters, war and political squabbles over its management. Often controversial, the forest also has been an inspiration, most notably to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling.

Scientists believe the dunes that nurture the sand pines were created either by winds or by ocean currents that once flowed over Florida. The quartz sand is up to 100 feet deep in places.

Scientists say the first trees appeared there 2 million years ago.

The first human inhabitants probably were Indians who wandered into the state more than 10,000 years ago, says forest archeologist Alan Dorian.

The Spanish, believed to be the first Europeans in the forest sometime in the early 1500s, called descendants of the nomads Ocali,, the meaning of which is not clear.

The Ocali and the early Europeans lived mostly along the banks of the Oklawaha and St. Johns rivers, Dorian said. The two rivers mark the northern, eastern and western boundaries of the forest.

Sometime in the early to mid-1800s, settlers started venturing away from the riverbanks, and the U.S. government began charting the land. One U.S. surveyor named Kerr -- the namesake of the forest's Lake Kerr -- spoke in his work notes of some Indians who were less than friendly, Dorian said.

In the late 1800s Florida experienced a major economic and population boom, he said. More and more people moved into the state, most of them for the same reasons they flock here today: to develop the land and to escape the North's bitter cold.

''Vast areas of the forest were devoted to citrus agriculture, which did real well until two devastating freezes hit in 1894 and 1895,'' Dorian said. When farmers could not pay property taxes, the government added the citrus land to the forest.

At the turn of the century, the timber and turpentine industries flourished at the expense of the forest, Dorian said. The sand pine of the Big Scrub did not suffer too badly, but the higher-grade slash and longleaf pines were all but wiped out.

Patches of slash and longleaf pine that grew amid the sea of sand pine were decimated. Loggers would cut every tree and replant none, Dorian said.

Thousands of trees were killed when their bark was scraped off for the collection of pine resin used to produce turpentine.

''When Roosevelt made the proclamation establishing the forest, it was during a period when Congress and the general public realized that the exploitation of timber resources was just getting out of hand,'' he said. ''The erosion and runoff were just horrendous.''

During the Depression, Congress added more land to the forest, again because of unpaid taxes. About 60,000 acres of new woods, mostly slash and longleaf pine, were tacked onto the national forest.

During the early and middle 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps helped build recreation sites at Alexander and Juniper springs.

Acreage has been added in bits and pieces over the years, including the 10,000-acre Salt Springs tract bought for about $12 million in 1978. Dubbed the ''last piece in the puzzle,'' the tract filled in the gap between Lake Kerr and the forest's natural eastern border, Lake George.

Milestones in the forest's history include the wildfire of 1935, which swept through 35,000 acres in less than five hours. Foresters call it the fastest spreading fire on record. The biggest fire since was last spring, when more than 13,000 acres burned.

In a small way, the forest figured into the Civil War. The St. Johns River was a heavily used transportation artery. A Confederate cavalry ambushed and sank a Union gunboat on the St. Johns at the north end of the forest, the only time in the war that Confederate troops took a Union ship.

Fort Mitchell, a small log outpost, stood on the forest's west side about 1814, Dorian said.

''It didn't last long,'' he said. Apparently it was abandoned and burned in a forest fire.